So let's first start by talking about the difference between the two biggest families in typography 1
which is the serif and the san serif. 2
So the serif typeface are differentiated from the san serif by these tiny little feet that you can see 3
highlighted in red and they are said to be slightly older than the san serifs. 4
But the reason why they have these little feet is actually because of stone carving. 5
So back in the days when people needed to carve out letters, Latin letters, in stone, 6
usually the designer would use a paint brush and paint the letters that they want 7
but the stonemasons would have to carve it out from that painting. 8
And I don't know how many of you guys have carved into stone before but not only is a difficult art 9
to master but it's also incredibly difficult to carve out Latin letters, Latin typefaces, on stone without 10
creating these tiny little feet. 11
It's just very difficult to carve out a 90 degree angle without having these reliefs. So hence a lot 12
of the serif typefaces that you'll see will look a lot more traditional a lot more conservative than 13
the more contemporary modern san serifs. 14
And when you're using different typefaces, usually people tend to use the serif typefaces for something 15
quite serious 16
for example a law office's letterhead and the san serifs are reserved for slightly more modern contemporary 17
design. 18
So once we've classified our typeface into serifs and the san serifs, the serifs are further subdivided 19
into four major families. 20
The first of which is old style. 21
So this is very much the oldest serif typeface family. 22
So this family includes fun such as Adobe Jenson such as Centaurs such as Goudy old style. And their 23
typeface is modeled on what text used to look like in The 1400s, 24
so very conservative very old looking. 25
And if you come further into the future you've got the transitional serif family which is slightly 26
more modern looking. 27
And a lot of these fonts you'll be familiar with this is your Times New Roman, 28
this is your Baskerville, 29
this is your Georgia for example. 30
And then if we come even further into modern times, you've got the modern serif typeface family. 31
So one such example is Didot which is the typeface that you see on the title of Vogue magazine and 32
it's an incredibly modern yet classy looking typeface. 33
And finally in the serif family you've got the slab serif 34
and we'll talk about slab serifs in just a second. 35
But first we're going to talk about how do you differentiate from these four major classes in the serif 36
family? 37
And it's actually quite easy to do. 38
Now when you compare these three styles side by side, old style versus transitional versus modern, if 39
you have a look at the thinnest versus the thickest part of the letters, you'll see that as you progress 40
from the older to the more modern type faces you'll see an increased difference in what we call the 41
modulation of the typeface. 42
So if you concentrate on the os for example comparing the old style to the modern, that thickness here 43
versus this is much larger than for example this versus this part. And a lot of this modulation comes 44
from the people who used to write with flat nibbed pens. 45
So for example imagine you know somebody in the Shakespearean era with their feathered pen, the way that 46
they turn that feather into a pen is by chopping the tip. 47
So you create a flat nib and then it holds the ink and allows you to write. Now that flat nib is 48
what gives you this modulation, 49
this difference between the thickest and thinnest parts of the font. Equally if you take a highlighter and 50
you try to write versus if you take a sharpie, you'll notice that the typeface that you create will look 51
different. 52
So what about the slab serif? As you can see, there's pretty much zero difference between the thickest 53
and the thinnest parts of the font. 54
And it was designed intentionally like so. Even though it's one of the modern members in the serif family, 55
it doesn't follow the rule of the more into the future you go the higher the greater the difference 56
between the thickest and the thinnest part of the font. 57
So why is that? 58
Well slab serif was actually created for a particular reason and it was created for Newspaper printing. 59
Now think about the times when Newspaper used to be printed on really poor quality paper. 60
What happens when you put ink on poor quality paper? 61
Well the ink will spread out and you will lose a lot of detail. 62
So if you think back to those comic books to be hand-lettered, the typeface that's used is a type of 63
comic book typeface but it looks very similar to this kind of slab serif. 64
And the reason why we style it like this is so that it would look good despite the poor quality of the 65
paper.